Seventy days / [by] W. Zagorski ('Lech') ; translated [from the Polish] by John Welsh.

Translation of Wicher wolności.

This English-language translation, published in 1957, is one of the first English-language books on the Warsaw Uprising. In the introduction, Commander Bor Komorowski recounts the events surrounding this Soviet-betrayed tragedy, and debunks the Soviet apologists' claim that the Red Army was then too weak to take Warsaw. In the weeks before their arrival at the outskirts of Warsaw, the Red Army had swept across eastern Poland, annihilating 25 German divisions. Only 16 German divisions stood against 160 divisions of the Red Army. (p. 10). This work includes many photographs One of them (facing pages 145) shows an unexploded shell of the German "Big Bertha" artillery. The Warsaw insurgents included not only Poles, but also individuals of many different nationalities. (p. 151). The youngest soldier mentioned was 11 year-old Wojtus (pp. 87-88). He was killed. (p. 105). The Germans used Polish civilians as shields. The Poles fired anyway, and the civilians scattered. (p. 61). The Germans would shoot those they captured en masse, and burn them in pyres. (p. 66). As the Uprising wore on, and the expected Soviet advance on Warsaw never materialized, the soldiers and civilians increasingly had to struggle with such things as dysentery, exhaustion, and lack of food. Eventually, sausages were made of cats, dogs, and horses. (p. 178). Some Jewish writers have made sweeping accusations of the AK (A. K.--the Polish Home Army) being anti-Semitic, and even of killing Jews. Is this factual? Zagorski, describing his battalion, notes that some of his men made anti-Jewish jokes until he forbade them to do so, that one Jewish officer was reluctant to admit his Jewishness, and that one of his men refused to accept the authority of any Jewish officer. However, these were exceptions. Zagorski comments: "...realizing that there were several dozen Jews in our battalion, some even obviously Jewish in their looks, but all of whom are generally popular with their comrades." (p. 160). Towards the end of the Uprising, as the situation in Warsaw grew increasingly untenable, a group of Jewish women were found robbed and murdered in their shelter. (p. 221). Nobody knows who was responsible. Bandits were known to don red-and-white armbands and pretend to be AK. (p. 229). Zagorski recounts how the brutalities of the German occupation had driven some Poles to banditry during the Occupation and now in the Uprising, and puts it in perspective as he writes: "For five years the Germans have been trying to destroy everything that was good in us, they hunted down every human instinct and encouraged everything that was inhuman, they fostered cruelty and injustice. And now there's all this chaos of the Insurrection, with nothing left of our normal way of life, including laws or indeed any kind of order. You'd expect this state of things to be a paradise for all kinds of scoundrels and rats and yet you've got to admit there are very few of them." (p. 230). Interestingly, a group of AK men (two battalions--up to 1,000 soldiers) wanted to continue fighting after the October 2 surrender. (p. 239). They still had nontrivial amounts of arms and ammunition. With the civilians having been evacuated, they should find enough food to subsist among the ruins for 4-6 weeks. Owing to the fact that they were situated among already-burned buildings, the Germans would have been unable to burn them out the way they did the Jewish Ghetto Fighters. But orders were orders. The last part of the diary discusses the German-forced evacuation of Warsaw. One of the men suggested that, unlike the situation in Wilno (Vilnius) after the AK helped take it as part of Operation Burza (Tempest), the Reds were not in a position to arrest the Underground-affiliated men in Warsaw owing to their vast numbers. (p. 18). This may explain why the Soviets opted instead to sit still and give the Germans plenty of time to destroy them and the entire city.